Maybe I’ll go back to dial-up for my Internet service. Then I won’t be so quick to “access” the latest news, the latest Washington, D.C., scandal, or the online edition of The National Enquirer. With all the dangling details of the Gen. Petraeus debacle, I might as well be watching “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”

I’m thinking we’re all a little too connected with everyone. The world is too much with us. Maybe it’s time for a landline phone, too. No rapid “dialing” on one of those modern puppies. It takes a long time for that dial to reset. I already have a pink princess model that was my mom’s. It wouldn’t take much to activate it.

Maybe I’ll become a bird-watcher.

Something.

When the most relaxing thing I can find to do is to sit by the chicken coop and watch the hens scratch and then to watch a gaggle of grackle sashay from one pecan tree to another, back and forth, back and forth, one continuous flow, well, that tells me I’m ready for a break — from news, from the scandal du jour, from knowing somebody else’s business.

I’m weak and I’m weary of knowing somebody else’s business.

By now I should know better. I got sucked into the Tiger Woods morass from the beginning that auspicious Thanksgiving weekend a few years back. I was OK until the eighth or ninth woman came forth, then I couldn’t let it go. I had to see it to the end. Sometimes I think I’m still in recovery from that.

I got dragged into the South Carolina governor mess (the one where his spokesman said he was walking the Appalachian Trail but really he was with his paramour in Argentina).

I got suckered into the Katie Holmes end-run around Tom Cruise when she and her Toledo, Ohio, lawyer father sucker-punched the movie star with divorce papers. I appreciated the pre-emptive move. The timing was unfortunate though: I was just breaking ties with TomKat.

Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal had my attention for a few days. What a nitwit.

Same with the NASA astronaut. Remember that one? That story just got worse and worse. Especially when the Depends part came out. That was the drama with the astronaut who drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando with a knife, a mallet and a BB gun. She was on a mission. She was going to do bodily harm to the woman she suspected her astronaut boyfriend was making eyes at. The Depends came into the picture when she figured she wouldn’t want to waste time pulling over at a rest stop. The real winner in that was Depends. Sales went way up.

You can’t make these stories up, people.

That kind of brings us around to the present. Full confession here: I did not have to stay up half the night this week to follow the Gen. Petraeus trail of tears vis-a-vis Paula Broadwell. I did not have to go from Frank Rich’s Twitter to a rerun on Jon Stewart where Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Stewart did competing push-ups, then to a repeat of a CSPAN broadcast where Broadwell was pimping her biography at a bookstore in Washington, D.C. No one was forcing my hand. There would be no pop quiz at the end of the day. The same news I read that night at 3 a.m. would be on the screen, in the paper, on the tube eight hours, 16 hours, 24 hours later.

I did not have to be so up-to-date with all the details. I did not have to be the one spreading the details. When I got to my class at Armstrong that morning all bleary-eyed and cranky, I tried to talk about the story — the thousands of emails that were sent, the newly identified third woman, the additional high-profile military officer, the unfortunate foreshadowing name of her biography (“All In”) – with the young woman who sits next to me. But it’s like eating potato chips. Once you start, you can’t stop. You need to keep the story alive.

My fellow student did not know what I was talking about.

Who’s Gen. Petraeus? she asked.

Exactly.

On my drive home from Armstrong, I tuned in to “Your Day,” a nature program from Clemson University on South Carolina’s ETV. The topic was birds. The timing was perfect.